Phones, smart TVs at risk, says WikiLeaks

Mar 8, 2017

WikiLeaks has revealed a batch of documents, codenamed “Vault 7”, that appears to implicate the CIA’s Centre for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) in hacking iPhones, Android phones and Smart TVs.
According to WikiLeaks, the documents indicate that CIA malware and hacking tools built by EDG (Engineering Development Group), a software development group within CCI, were used to infest smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones.
Placing the TVs in a “fake-off” mode, the tools are said to allow the TV to record conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server.
It also appears as if the CIA’s Mobile Devices Branch (MDB) developed attacks to remotely hack and control popular smart phones. Phones thus infected could be instructed to send the CIA the user’s geolocation, audio and text communications as well as covertly activate the phone’s camera and microphone.
The targeted devices are said to include iPhones and other Apple products as well as Android devices.
A WikiLeaks analysis claims that the CIA also runs a substantial effort to infect and control Microsoft Windows users with its malware. This, it says, includes multiple local and remote weaponised “zero days”, air gap jumping viruses such as “Hammer Drill” which infects software distributed on CD/DVDs, infectors for removable media such as USBs, systems to hide data in images or in covert disk areas ( “Brutal Kangaroo”) and to keep its malware infestations going.